Tuesday, March 05, 2013

A good person never sacrifices his own interests for the well-being of another.

This is not because a good person is selfish. Rather, it is because a good person is a person that has those interests that tend to fulfill the desires of others. A good person may rush into a burning building to save her children. However, this is not an act of self-sacrifice. It is the best way available to her (we may assume) to realize her own interest in her children's well-being.

A good person has an interest in being somebody others can depend on and in being honest. He enjoys helping others, and prefers spending money to provide a child with medicine to prevent blindness to buying tickets to a local sporting event or concert. He is not giving up anything he values when he does this. Instead, he is realizing the things that he values - he is pursuing the things that interest him. It's just that what interests him are things that produce benefits to others.

This topic comes up because of a post I wrote on space development.

In that post, I discussed the claim that money sent on space development is wasted and we should worry about the problems we have here on Earth before spending money on a space program.

One of me answers to this assertion is to note that if we are looking for something to cut spending on so that we can "solve the problems here on earth," the space program sits pretty far down the list. I mentioned computer games, movies, sports, and dining. I added jewelry, cosmetics, and ocean cruises.

We can clearly argue that the making of a film version of "The Hobbit" can wait until we have solved sone of the problems here on Earth. The 3 to 4 billion dollars people will spend on movie tickets for the trilogy can help a lot of children.

This invited a criticism (often applied to act-utilitarian theories, where it is valid) - that the theory is too demanding. It seems that one must give up very thing that one enjoys as long as there is a hungry child in the world.

For example, this has been a constant criticism of Peter Singer's preference-satisfaction act utilitarianism. "One should always perform the act that satisfies the most preferences, regardless of whose they are."

However, desirism is not so much about what we should do as much as it is about what we should want. It is not about sacrificing an interest in seeing "The Hobbit" so that one can provide health care to a sick child. It is about being interested in providing health care to a sick child instead of having an interest to see "The Hobbit." The good person does not say, "I would love to see 'The Hobbit', but my money should go to feeding the poor instead." Instead, her interest in seeing, "The Hobbit" is like her interest in watching grass grow. She sacrifices nothing in refusing to see "The Hobbit" because she does not care to see it.

Because she has this particular set of interests, the world is a better place than it would be if she was somebody who wanted to see "The Hobbit" but cared nothing about the welfare of a sick child. People generally have more and stronger reasons to promote the first set of interests over the second, and to use praise and condemnation to realize this end.

I do not write this from a position of perfect virtue. I spend time doing things where I know there is little to no reason to praise people who have those interests. I can be found wasting time with a computer game where an interest in something else would be motivating me to do more good. I spend money on dining that could better be spent helping those who are starving. However, the quality of the interests I have does not change what people generally have reason to promote or inhibit through praise and condemnation.

However, my personal interests do not change the fact of what people generally have more and stronger reason to praise or to condemn. People, of course, want to see themselves as more worthy of praise and less worthy of condemnation. Consequently, there is a tendancy to adopt absurd arguments that boost the value of one's own likes. Yet, the fact of the matter remains stubbornly independent of the agent's personal interests.

Furthermore, it is a mistake to interpret this argument as claiming that, "We must force people to give up what they enjoy so that the resources can go to something more useful." It is, instead, an argument about which interests we have reason to promote and which we have reason to inhibit. If people enjoyed working toward better health care for all children a little more, and cared a little less about who will win the Super Bowl, so that they spend more time and money on the former and less time and money on the latter, the world would be a better place. But they are not sacrificing an interest in sports to provide health care for children. Instead, they would not have the interest in sports to sacrifice.

This is the way desirism looks at moral issues. A good person and the villain are alike in doing what they like. The difference is not found in what they do except insofar as what they do is a by-product of what they want.

2 comments:

Jesse Reeve
said...

The good person does not say, "I would love to see 'The Hobbit', but my money should go to feeding the poor instead." Instead, her interest in seeing, "The Hobbit" is like her interest in watching grass grow. She sacrifices nothing in refusing to see "The Hobbit" because she does not care to see it....If people enjoyed working toward better health care for all children a little more, and cared a little less about who will win the Super Bowl, so that they spend more time and money on the former and less time and money on the latter, the world would be a better place. But they are not sacrificing an interest in sports to provide health care for children. Instead, they would not have the interest in sports to sacrifice.

If this is your desirist vision of the good person, then it provides the refutation of desirism that you invited on March 4th-- or at least your vision of the consequences of desirism.

First, your "good person" with an interest in universal health care and feeding the poor, and no interest in cinema and sports, is a chimera. A mythical beast. You will find the Christian God before you find this "good person", because at least it is possible to write plausible fiction about the Christian God. Creating art and seeking competition are anthropologically universal human impulses (present in all cultures and time periods).

Second, a world of "good people" -- with "no interest" in competition, art, fine dining, sex, etc.-- would be a world that no real people want to live in. Apparently act-utilitarian theories ask too much-- that one must give up [e]very thing that one enjoys as long as there is a hungry child in the world. But consider this vision of desirism, asking that you give up the enjoyment itself! Would you rather sacrifice one good meal, or all of your enjoyment of food-- let alone everyone's enjoyment of food, forever? Which of these theories is really asking more?

Third, this concept of "goodness" ignores some very real things of value. It is all very well to say that it is better to spend money on preventing blindness in children than on paying for sports or art; but without the Super Bowl to watch or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to look at, why bother to prevent blindness? Without the capacity to enjoy what one sees, what exactly is so great about being able to see? How is this a life worth living?

I'm no Christian, but when they're right, they're right:

Now when Jesus was in Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper, there came unto him a woman having an alabaster box of very precious ointment, and poured it on his head, as he sat at meat. But when his disciples saw it, they had indignation, saying, "To what purpose is this waste? For this ointment might have been sold for much, and given to the poor." When Jesus understood it, he said unto them, "Why trouble ye the woman? for she hath wrought a good work upon me. For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always. For in that she hath poured this ointment on my body, she did it for my burial.

Yes. But what are you advocating here? Do you support a movement to develop such productive interests in people? Or is this post just a "state of the human condition" piece?

That aside, I'm not sure the "good person" can always act in "good ways". The problem with applying any moral theory is that the intentional agent cannot be expected to always have enough information to determine the best possible action.

About Me

When I was in high school, I decided that I wanted to leave the world better off than it would have been if I had not existed. This started a quest, through 12 years of college and on to today, to try to discover what a "better" world consists of. I have written a book describing that journey that you can find on my website. In this blog, I will keep track of the issues I have confronted since then.